MB UNIUD

Exercises pages 326 and 327.

1) Reading the extract I understood the poet starts imagining a possible alternativa to the desolate and sterile land: "if there were water we should stop and drink". He imagines an alternative, in which people could stop and drink water.

2)
a. In lines 1-15 the landscape is starile and desolate, where life cannot exist. There are only rocks (that is repeated six times in this extract), sand and mountains, which are “dead imagines” of nature. There is also the opposition of water(three times), as a matter of fact there everything is dry, also storms have not rain.
b. The landscape described in lines 16-29 in imaginary. The narrator imagines water, he is trying so hard to find life and water, that he is able to heard it, but “there is no water”.
c. The landscape is the same of sterility and desolation, but in the second there’s kind of chance of change: the imagined water, its sound.
d. The most representative difference in sound is created by the opposition of the words “rock” and “water”. The first one is an hard-sounded term. The second id more sweet.

3) The water has the power to change the sterile landscape. As a matter of fact the word “dry” is the opposite of “water”, which can bring life to a place, where there’s not.

4) Concentrating on the choise of words made by the poet, the terms “dry”, “road”, “rock”, “to drink”, “mountains” and so on, would be regarded as conventionally “unpoetic”.

5)
a. No, it is not. As a matter of fact some lines are composed by more words than others.
b. No, it has not regular stanzas, because the extract is organised into two different stanzas, but the first is longer than the second one.
c. The rhythm and the layout contribute to underline the opposition between “water” and “rock”, and so between the two different landscapes.